Andreas Rau, Symphony for n Metronomes: A shared time, a distributed gesture

At first, it appears as pure rhythm. Minimal pulses, digital pendulums, visual oscillations on an interface. Each element moves with essential elegance, as if dancing within a space of silence.

But it becomes clear that Symphony for n Metronomes by Andreas Rau is far from a mere algorithmic installation. It is a work that reflects on the nature of time, on the decentralization of authorship, on collective intelligence shaped through code. To explore this framework, we spoke with the artist and posed a few key questions about the development of the piece.

Fakewhale: Symphony for n Metronomes appears to invert the traditional figure of the artist-author, decentralizing control of the work in favor of a system that evolves through participant activation. How did you arrive at this reflection on decentralized authorship, and how do you see it redefining the role of the artist within the digital context? 

Andreas Rau: Originally, I had this idea of a networked series. I wanted to create a shared virtual space that collectors inhabit together rather than a collection of isolated tokens that everyone owns separately. This alone is a departure from the traditional model of collecting, made possible by the networked nature of the blockchain. The concept of decentralized authorship was a logical next step to further strengthen the feeling of together shaping a shared experience. As a jazz musician, I see similarities to a jam session. Everybody can participate, yet the outcome is unknown. This concurrence of creation and performance tends to unleash a certain energy that I wanted to introduce to my code-based work. Generally, I’m interested in bending our understanding of what it means to participate in an artwork. In 2021, I made a piece called Disharmony that interacts with the blockchain and behaves differently based on how many editions you collect. Symphony for n Metronomes continues this line of thought and introduces another layer to it: Collectors’ actions have an impact not only on their own pieces, but on the entire series. This redefines the role of the collector from passive spectator to active participant, where the act of minting contributes to the piece itself. The role of the artist, in turn, is reframed from being the sole “author” to being a kind of system architect, facilitator, or even choreographer. Similar models have a long tradition both within and outside the digital context. Symphony for n Metronomes is, in many ways, inspired by Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes (1962) by Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti. Here, one hundred mechanical metronomes are set to different speeds, started simultaneously and set loose to unwind according to their own internal logics. The artist deliberately relinquishes control almost entirely once the performance begins. Similarly, in code-based art, after an algorithm is set in motion, it proceeds autonomously and generates new outputs based on different parameters outside the artist’s control. For the now conventional blockchain-based model of long-form generative art, the transaction hash shapes the randomness of every output. In Symphony for n Metronomes, this influence goes beyond your own contribution and doesn’t end at the time of minting.